Places I like to go

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Daniel Knox

I think I'd better start linking more than one review a day if I'm ever going to catch up...here's a real oddball gem from David Lynch collaborator Daniel Knox.

Daniel Knox Evryman For Himself La Société Expéditionnaire

It’s sort of fun to try to pinpoint exactly where Daniel Knox’s songs go off the rails, running like a railway car over well-trodden, pre-war music hall tracks until they suddenly leap for the canyons. These 14 songs vary in style, from Salvation Army band oompah marches to slinky rhumbas to Dixieland struts to piano balladry of a sort that went out with Brylcreem. Yet they’re all, to one degree or another, deeply weird and subversive, a kind of sentimental journey without the sentimentality. Daniel Knox is a Chicagoan, an ex-film student who once accompanied David Lynch’s Inland Empire on organ at its premiere. His background in film may explain his taste for noire-ish scenarios, or for the realistic details that ground his unsettling fantasies. These are stylish meditations on the brutish-ness of life, written in tightly scanning verses with striking, unexpected rhymes. Knox’s piano playing, reportedly learned by ear and on the sly at the Hilton Towers Ballroom in Chicago, is fine and florid. His supporting players – most consistently drummer Jason Toth, bassist Paul Parts and sax and clarinetist Ralph Carney, but also including brass and strings and musical saw (that’s David Coulter) – are wryly capable, a band of straight men setting up Knox’s antics.

We continue to dominate the middle school track world of southern Vermont and New Hampshire...girls came in second last night with a much abbreviated team, boys also second at their boys-only meet on Friday but by only a couple of points, again losing, just barely to Keene, which has three or four times as many kids as we do. We have a 400 runner who runs the event in 60 seconds flat (in 8th grade!!), also regularly wins the 100 meters with a 12.3-12.5. Nice kids this year, too.